Were the Founding Fathers atheists?

Review of Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart

Stewart embeds the philosophical convictions of the Founding Fathers into a riveting narrative of the formulation of the Declaration of Independence and even the establishment of American institutions - all by politicians, he posits, who were explicitly hiding their atheism. Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz are important characters, but it is Epicurus and Lucretius who are the real stars.

Epicurus was a Hellenistic philosopher whose teachings were repressed in Rome as subversive. Fortunately, a poet (Lucretius) preserved the essence of his ideas in a poem, Of the Nature of Things. Unlike the caricature of his ideas that survive, i.e. eat well and don't think too much, Stewart informs us that his ideas were the direct precursors of the Enlightenment view of “nature as machine”. Its elements included: 1) the earth is but one planet in an infinite universe, not at the center of anything; 2) there are no Gods, which in fact are only used as means of control by the powerful; 3) there is no transcendent realm, but only the natural world in which we find ourselves; 4) this natural world can be understood on its own terms by the application of human reason.

The rediscovery of his ideas was revolutionary. Spinoza and others extended them in the context of monotheism and especially in the theocratic context (the Reformation) from which the west was emerging. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment philosophes to varying degrees argued that God should be completely taken out of the equation, that nature was comprehensible on its own and the elucidation of its mechanisms was the great new task of natural philosophy. This formulation was soon refined into the modern scientific methodology - theorize, observe, verify. It was an appeal not just to reason, but clearly implied that God could not be proven to exist or in any event was irrelevant to the workings of the universe. They also extended the naturalistic reasoning to government.

This was heady stuff at the time, most of it articulated as Europe was recovering from the astonishing brutality of the Reformation wars, when people were still being burned at the stake for heresy or at a minimum ostracized by polite society. No wonder, Stewart argues, that the Philosophes as well as America's Founding Fathers decided to hide their atheism behind deism (i.e., even if God created the universe, it is a machine that he doesn’t manage), which many denounced as heretical anyway.

Once God was no longer the principal reference point, the sacred texts and the entire tradition of monarchic government began to lose their authority. This was the first time this kind of thought freedom had emerged since the time of Constantine, which is why, Stewart argues, the movement spawned the idea of a secular republic in the US and a decade later in France – from then on, leaders no longer had a divine mandate to rely on, but reigned more or less in accordance with the will of “the people” (however limited that notion was at the time). In place of a mandate of heaven, mankind should strive to understand the reasons for their behavior and courses of actions, arriving at them by conviction and debate rather than some unquestionable authority.

This makes for a compelling read, but there are long sections that plumb the logical exigencies and moral implications of the ideas like any philosopher should do. I find that sort of academic exercise turgid and boring, so I skipped most of them, hewing instead to the narrative of both the intellectual development of individuals like Jefferson and Franklin and their attempts to create a politics based on their convictions.

This in my view is philosophy at its very best: ideas and how they were applied and what they led to. Stewart avoids the trap of most philosophy books, which at their worst can be the driest of academic reading experiences, advancing obscure proofs and arguments ridiculously disconnected from the real world and in completely awful prose.

As an atheist myself, I have no problem with Stewart's contention that the Founding Fathers were in fact crypto-atheists almost to a one. The reality of what they really thought about God will never be known, indeed I think they may have hedged their bets and were actually agnostics. I say this to warn religious readers.

This book isn't for everyone, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how the Founding Fathers interpreted and used the Enlightenment. It is a great history of ideas.